Our relationship with e-books: It’s too complicated

One of the best things about media going digital is that it can be easily shared and distributed to others with just a click — except of course that it often doesn’t work like that, thanks to copyright or licensing restrictions and competing platforms. E-books are a great example: Theoretically, it should be easy to share not just books, but passages we like, and there are a number of startups and services like OpenMargin and Readmill and Findings that are trying to make this happen. But competing rights, standards and platforms mean these kinds of features are available on only a tiny fraction of books, and that keeps most readers inside their little reading silos.

It’s a similar story with Readmill, which is also trying to create a kind of social network around books and reading. The German company’s service comes with an iPad and iPhone reader that allows users to share not just their favorite quotes from books, but also their reviews and recommendations — a kind of “Last.fm for books.” But they only support non-DRM books as well, which reduces the utility of the service dramatically. Both Readmill and OpenMargin say they have open APIs (application programming interfaces) that would allow developers and e-reader makers to build support for them into their products. But will they? That seems unlikely at best.

Obviously, book publishers are a big part of the problem, since they restrict which books can be lent and for how long, and place all kinds of other restrictions on where e-books can be sold and what features they allow. But Amazon and Apple and Barnes & Noble and Kobo are part of the problem as well. Each wants to lock customers to their platform, because their revenue depends on it. Amazon’s whole strategy with the Kindle Fire is to supply a device that welds a customer to its content-distribution and shopping services.

In a recent rant at the PBS MediaShift blog, Dorian Benkoil wrote about what he called the current state of e-book “hell,” in which even readers who are willing to pay for books via the Kindle and other platforms are restricted in what they can do with them. For example, why don’t publishers and distributors allow us to download digital versions of the print books we buy? And why do platforms like the Kindle and Apple’s iBooks — or even Google’s supposedly open Books service — make some features unavailable, such as highlighting or copying and pasting, or text-to-audio?

Frustrated consumers will find a way to get books they want, often in ways that don’t benefit the publisher or the author. I, for example, bought the print version of one book, and wanted to buy it for the Kindle. When it wasn’t available, I found a copy online for free that may have been illicit.

Will we ever be able to download a digital version of the print book we just bought, and then share that book with friends — or even sell it to someone else at a discounted price, as we can with real books — or share our margin notes and highlights with others, regardless of what e-book reader they use? Based on the current state of the market, that seems like an almost unobtainable dream, unless some government agency forces publishers and retailers/e-book reader companies to adopt true open standards (which seems unlikely).

The unfortunate part of all this, of course, is that publishers would likely be able to sell far more books if they made it easier for readers to download, read and share them — or passages from them — with anyone regardless of what device they owned. Until that happens, e-books will continue to be a Balkanized mess of competing standards and sharing silos, and the book-reading public will be the worse for it.